5 minutes

I got a surprise email this week saying they wanted my PowerPoint slides for a presentation on Monday. I said, “What is this all about?’ Then I figured out I had volunteered to give a presentation at a workshop and forgot all about it. I gave a presentation to this group a month ago, and the working group’s chairman said my presentation should have been more appropriate for their interests. So, I scrambled to find out more about the theme of the working group and put together a brand new presentation based on my research focusing on their interests, which wasn’t too easy. I submitted the slides just before the deadline. Then, on my evening walk the next night, I thought, “I bet they have a special format they want the slides in.” I went to their website and discovered they had a unique format I was supposed to use. So, after the deadline passed, I converted all my slides to the proper format and resubmitted them with my apologies. The chairman of the meeting wrote me a nice email saying they looked AWESOME. Another workshop organizer wrote me and said my slides reminded him of why he got into systems engineering in the first place. So, I was pleased that my hard work had paid off.
Then, today, I got the schedule for the workshop and found out I only had 5 minutes to present my presentation. I thought I had a half hour. Wow, that was unpleasant news after all the work I put into the slides.